Randomositiy: The State of Wayfinding at Northeastern University // Jan 31, 10:53 AM
A presentation on SlideShare about a wayfinding study for Northeastern University. I feel honored to have my campus map of Kent State used as a precedent next to campus maps of RISD and MassArt.
Rethinking the Campus // Dec 27, 11:42 PM
An article by prof. David Middleton titled “Rethinking the Campus” appeared in last issue of the SEGD magazine. It gives an overview of the wayfinding study we performed at Kent State in the fall of 2007 with a number of visiting EGD professionals (David Gibson, Wayne McCutcheon, Paul Vernon, Gary Stemler).
Here is a quick scan. (~3 MB PDF)
Dear current VCD graduate students // Dec 9, 12:17 PM
By popular request, below is the paperwork I needed to file and deadlines I needed to meet in order to complete my thesis. I hope you may find this useful in the process of completing yours.
The views and recommendations expressed on this post are my own, and do not express the views or recommendations of Kent State University, the College of Communication and Information, or the School of Visual Communication Design.
- Fill out the “Application for Graduation“ form and either email it as an attachment to Matt Rollyson (mrollyso@kent.edu) with subject “Graduation Application,” or take it to 113 Moulton Hall (The CCI office where Matt works). They say that you can also fax it but I say what grad student has a fax machine? You may have access to one but secretaries in the department have enough on their plates already. Besides, that relationship you have carefully cultivated with secretaries over the duration of your grad studies will pay off with higher dividends when you need to fax that job application in about 5 months. Take the date of your form submission, add two weeks to it, and put the resulting date in your calendar. A confirmation from CCI that they have received and processed your request for graduation should arrive by this date. Deadline for graduation applications is usually within the first week of your final semester.
- For international students: You must remain a full-time student to be legal with USCIS. Sometimes, it happens that a thesis is the only thing on your schedule because you already took all the required classes. If this happens, it is not a problem. Just go to the ISS office and file a “Reduced Coursework” form. This will exempt you from the requirement and keep you legal.
- Find a faculty member willing to serve as the thesis advisor. See them and ask if they are willing and able to do that while presenting them the thesis idea.
- Write up a formal thesis topic proposal. I didn’t find any particular guidelines or use any specific formats for the proposal since I think it can vary widely. Obviously, you may need to do some secondary research for the proposal itself to figure out what could and should be done, but keep it short. Research is what you thesis will be about.
- Talk to the thesis advisor about potential thesis committee members. You may have certain people in mind already but the advisor may have suggestions too.
- Share the proposal with the committee members and see if they are willing and able to serve on the committee. Give them enough time to read your proposal before responding. I have no idea how long is enough. It depends on the length of the proposal as well. I reserved about a week and a half for a proposal of 1,500 words (which is on the verbose side).
- If they are willing to be a committee member, have each faculty member sign a form titled “Notification of Approved Thesis Topic.” Then have the graduate coordinator and the dept. chair sign it too and file it with the college (Matt again). It is official now. Deadline: end of the semester before the semester in which you graduate.
- I found it helpful to make a rough schedule for myself with milestones and rough due dates for literature review, primary research, first draft, etc. Of course, these parts will overlap and that is not a bad thing. But, everyone has a different personal organization style. The CCI has a style guide for thesis and dissertations which you will have probably received from the thesis advisor by now.
- Set up an initial meeting with the thesis committee and present your plan. You may call meetings whenever you feel one is necessary but keep in mind that finding a mutually agreeable meeting time between three people on academic schedules can be insanely difficult. You advisor may poke you if they feel concerned about your progress, but the initiative for the meetings comes solely from you, not the committee.
- Sign up for the electronic thesis and dissertations filing workshop at the library. This is optional and you’ll be okay if you skip it since the instructions on their site are abundant. I found it a useful as a reminder that I have really got to get this thing done. You may meet interesting people there or catch up with old acquaintances.
- For international students: Apply for OPT unless you plan going back home right after you graduate. To get your employment authorization card (EAD) shortly after graduation, you should file the form I-765 with accompanying materials with USCIS three months before the desired employment start date. Although it’s possible to apply for pre-completion OPT, the ISS office at Kent State will generally not let you do that. They will want you to prove that you are in fact applying for post completion OPT. They do this by making you get a signature from the graduate coordinator testifying that you have completed all coursework besides the thesis on this form. Chances are, they will not file your OPT application until you get that signature. Your graduate coordinator will have no idea about what any of this means, so make sure to get the boilerplate letter from the ISS office to give to your coordinator which explains the situation.
- Schedule the oral defense date. Your advisor will most likely contact you when it’s time to schedule. Deadline for the defense is typically more than a month before a planned graduation date. The availability of the committee members can push this date further in the undesirable direction. What you must have for the oral defense is a “defense copy” of the thesis. Print two extra copies of the signature page for the defense.
- If the thesis includes a project with any visuals (especially if project, rather than the research, is the focus), check in the visual with the thesis advisor before the defense. In other words, do not let the defense be the first time when the advisor gets to see the visuals to avoid any potential unpleasantries.
- The oral defense will result in another form that the advisor may ask you to take over to Matt (again) at the CCI.
- Gather signatures on two signature pages from the advisor and the school director in black ink. Take signatures over to the CCI (Attn: Matt. Notice the pattern?).
- Filing deadline is usually over two weeks after the oral defense deadline to allow enough time for the committee to read the defense copy. Make any changes requested by the committee and get their go-ahead before filing. The writing center on the 4th fl. of the library is a great resource for proofreading in addition to friends and family. Do not expect much structural feedback though but they will be helpful with style and mechanics. Schedule appointments up front for the whole week or more. Seeing a different writing tutor each time surprisingly works well, although seeing the same tutor a few times in a row might make things faster. If you manage to complete the writing center sessions before the defense, the committee will love you.
- CCI will review your filed thesis from the system and inevitably will find something that needs to be revised. There will be a deadline for this too. The signature page needs to have names typed next to signature lines. The dean’s name must include his middle initial, T (if Dr. Stanley T. Wearden is still the Dean by the time of your filing). This revision is submitted directly to Matt and he will put it in the system for you. You should get another filing confirmation email with a number when that happens.
- Pat yourself on the back, grab a huge lunch and learn how to relax a bit.
(For some strange reason my CMS is reseting the ordered list count on the last list item. Number 1 should be 18. I am upgrading to the latest version in hope that this issue has been addressed.)
Comparison: Christiano Ronaldo and The Incredible Hulk // Dec 7, 10:58 AM
Via Sarajevo-x.
Andy Budd on the State of Web Design Education // Dec 2, 12:31 PM
What really struck me was the response from those aged 19 and younger, 75% of whom felt education had little or no value. The statistics would seem to indicate that the education system is failing people at the point of their lives when it matters the most.
and
Just because you’re a digital designer doesn’t mean everything has to be digital, so we need people who can sketch out concepts, articulate their reasoning and defend their decisions both written and verbally.
Probably, many parallels could be drawn between the U.S. and U.K. in this regard. I feel that many departments in the U.S., however, have not lost the focus on teaching the core design skills and educating well rounded designers. At least good ones have not. But it is rare that a contemporary design student connects what they can learn on their own about the web to the core skills and principles being taught in the classroom. Picking up latest tricks from Web Designer Depot must seem like more fun!
The shortage of design educators with capacity to do professional-grade web design is evident but also is the shortage of web professionals qualified to teach. Can you blame the institutions for relying on the former? The web has hardly been around for 20 years. Discussions like these are an indication that this gap about to start getting bridged, I think.
UPDATE:
What we need to do is encourage more practitioners into design education and encourage more design educators to continue their practice.
Amen to that.
Zen Coding // Nov 22, 01:12 AM
Here is a novel idea.
Mind you, TextMate already solves some of these problems like wrap a block in… or wrap each line in… and some TextMate users (like myself) probably have custom snippets for automating things like navigation or unordered lists but the direct-descendant-type-selector that creates nested structures is interesting nonetheless.
I just tried the TextMate plugin and it works wonderfully based on few extremely simple use cases that I tried. Full post with all the features is over at Smashing Magazine.
Designers Create Symbols to Show Way in Hospitals // Sep 12, 02:20 PM
Lisa Cornwell did an article for AP describing the project our class worked on last year under Prof. David Middleton. The article was picked up by many news outlets.
Hospitals can be tough to navigate, especially for immigrants who speak little or no English. So students at four colleges have designed a series of navigation symbols – from a large white tooth to show dental services, to a head with gears inside depicting mental health services – as a way to help guide immigrants through the daunting mazes of hospital hallways and buildings. [...] The design students attend the University of Cincinnati and Kent State University in Ohio, California Polytechnic State University and Iowa State University.
That’s us! And here’s the link.
Scandinavian Companies and their Tpefaces // Aug 27, 11:12 AM
There’s been some rustle over the IKEA’s switch from a modified version of Paul Renner’s Futura to Matthew Carter’s Verdana for IKEA’s marketing communication.
I wanted to point out another Scandinavian company which uses a typeface (made by Erik Spiekermann) for their marketing communication that just does not work in print, Nokia. Nokia’s custom typeface works wonderfully on low-resolution raster screens. I loved it on my Nokia 6010 because of the legibility and personality it maintains despite such conditions unlike most other low-resolution typefaces. Nokia’s print typeface is drived from this same screen-type so that all their corporate communications could be consistent. But while the curves are smooth, It might be impossible for one typeface to successfully cover such range of applications. With all due respect for Herr. Spiekermann’s work, Nokia’s typeface looks misplaced in print and looks equally awkward on the web.
Some Photos from Recent Trip to Kansas City // Aug 18, 04:54 PM
A couple having a picnic next to
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen
Shuttlecocks, 1994
Aluminum, fibergalss-reinforced plastic, paint
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Museum visitors in front of
Nicholas Poussin
The Triumph of Bacchus, 1635-1636
Oil on canvas
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Joan Miró
Women at Sunrise, 1946
Oil on canvas
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Kemper Museum of Conteporary Art
Entrance to the Kemper
Some facts we already know
There are two displays like this one running an incredible piece of motion design and information visualization. I don’t know who is responsible for motion design but it smells like MK12 although I can’t find it in their portfolio. It literally brings history to life.
American Involvement in the War
The monument
Colleges with Best Paid Graduates // Aug 4, 05:47 PM
Here’s a list of colleges sorted by it’s graduates’ income.
The author claims that the data is
collected by a research company named Payscale. They surveyed nearly 1.2 million users of their site over the last year. People self-reported their salaries and educational credentials along with school they graduated from.
Kent State is pretty far down the list, with starting median salary of $39,100 and mid-career median salary of $64,300. Of course, depending on ones discipline these numbers can mean close to nothing but it’s interesting to see the big picture.
What seems to be implied by the numbers though is that graduates outside of private, engineering, or Ivy League colleges have limited career advancement potential.
Design Observer Redesign // Aug 4, 05:38 PM
I just realized that Design Observer got redesigned and expanded.
The Design Observer Group will now house four channels at designobserver.com, and our homepage will surface the best and newest from these channels.
Observatory, Change Observer, Places, Observer Media.
.webfont proposal // Jul 16, 11:35 AM
I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be able to use a font in a webpage the way I use background images thourgh CSS without violating any licenses.
Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland are proposing a new font format for use on the web, aptly named .webfont.
It’s great to see so may foundries endorsing the format:
- Typotheque
- H&FJ
- Vllg
- House Industries
- Allegedly FontFont and Christian Schwartz too, but can’t find direct links
- Karsten Luecke Type Foundry (new find for me)
- Process
- Bold Monday (another new one for me)
- Fonthead
- Mark Simonson
- Type Supply and LettError (these are, well, obvious…)
It seems like this list is about to get outgrown instantaneously.
Type foundries are after all a key to making it happen by supporting formats like this one and revising their current or introducing new licences (take clues from Typotheque). If FontShop, for example, also endorsed the proposed format, what a wonderful environment to be a web designer. On further reflection, wouldn’t this be an opportunity for smaller foundries to gain font market share in an industry dominated by big guys?